Sam Smith - Back in the early 1980s, some of the farm's cows were pastured on rented land near the Brunswick Naval Air Station, then key to our strategic defenses against the Soviet Union. It had around 40 planes and two dozen atom bombs.
One day the commanding officer called my mother and heatedly said that 17 of her cows were blocking the main runway of the air station. His tone and rhetoric implied that if America were to lose the Cold War, she would bear major responsibility.
My mother was too well-mannered to ask the captain what sort of national security he was providing if 17 cows could break through his perimeter. Instead, she promptly dispatched the farm manager, Charlie Degrandpre, to retrieve the strays.
The captain, however, forgot to tell the guards at the main gate that a farmer in a pickup would be by to get his cows off the runway. The guards were thoroughly skeptical of Charlie's story, and thus Charlie, unlike the 17 cows, was denied immediate access.
The impatient captain took command in the best naval tradition. He ordered the base fire trucks to the runway with sirens blaring. The cows, quite naturally, took to the 3,000 acres that surrounded the airstrip and were not seen again for a week, when, early on the Sunday morning of the officers invitational golf tournament, they turned up en masse on the 9th green.
